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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A robotic system shutdown busted Monday's spacewalk right the International Space Station, leaving an astronaut stuck with an 800-pound viscus in his safekeeping for nearly a half-hour.

Good abstract it was weightless.

Spacewalker Stephen Bowen was in no danger, but it didn't good pleasant.

Mission Control asked if he was comfortable.

"I'm fine as daylong as it's not too much longer," Bowen radioed. "How much longer?"

Bowen was alert on a diminutive papers at the modify of the 58-foot robotic arm, used to carry spacewalking astronauts where they need to go.

The difficulty arose at the two-hour evaluation when a impact send controlling the mechanism limb shut down. The astronauts operative the limb exclusive the expanse send hurried with every their manuals, notes and laptops to added machine send in added room.

It took a patch to get the ordinal send working. For nearly a half-hour, the limb was motionless, with Bowen stuck gripping the 5-by-4-foot busted chilling pump.

He dared not let go.

Bowen was told the trouble would be resolved soon. But it took several more transactions until the mechanism limb came backwards to life. Finally, the activeness resumed and Bowen carried the viscus to its newborn location on the exterior of the expanse station. He got support from man spacewalker Alvin histrion in latching the viscus down.

NASA officials later blamed a machine code flaw and said it had been corrected.

Despite the snag, Bowen and histrion managed to rank every their field chores, including prep impact for instalment a newborn storage shack at the station. They modify had time for an activity experiment.

As the 6 1/2-hour spacewalk wrapped up, histrion twisted the top of a diminutive bottle, ridding it of air and filling it with the clean of space. NASA calls the Asian research "message in a bottle."

There's no actual communication inside, but the bottleful is subscribed by astronauts and module be put on pass in Japan. It's an try by the Asian Space Agency to improve public interest.

In a bit of expanse trivia, histrion became the world's 200th spacewalker when he emerged from the 220-mile-high complex. The first was Soviet cosmonaut Alexi Leonov in 1965. He and Bowen module go backwards discover Wednesday for one test spacewalk.

Bowen got his spacewalking assignment as a unreal for Timothy Kopra, who was scraped last period in a cycle happening and bumped soured the flight.

And he won't get a effort at added shuttle ride. This is Discovery's test voyage, and exclusive two another shuttle trips remain. The fast module be old by summer's end.

Late Monday, the astronauts scholarly they module get an player day in space, with the assignment long to 12 days. The astronauts module do whatever player impact at the expanse station, and there may be a flyaround of the entire complex by a Soyuz capsule for picture-taking.

Once landing on March 8, Discovery module be old and sent to the Smithsonian Institution. It's NASA's long flying shuttle, circling the follower for what amounts to nearly a year over its lifetime of 39 missions in 26 years.

Shuttle Endeavour, meanwhile, was moved into NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building downbound in Florida as the spacewalk unfolded. It should head to the pad next week for an April 19 launch.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

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